Category Archives: Journalism

The Internet is full of words for which it never paid.

The original conception of a Journal or a Magazine was based in a traditional principle: writing an article and getting paid for it.

Today, in the Internet Universe, a journalist writes an article and in most cases he doesn’t get paid for it.

This new rule of the game seems to be killing journalism as a profession.

Music and Arts have also been impacted for this change.

The only Art creations that still are safe are those that cannot be downloaded or copied from the Internet.

First Fact: Without words the Internet would be meaningless, so it managed to get stuffed with words and has never paid for them.

Internauts pay for products and services that they buy thru Internet, but all the contents that live there are free of charge.

The Second Fact is that journalism never managed to develop and impose a system to charge for articles published on the Internet.

This is leading to a terminal crisis for journalism, because many times journalists don’t get paid for the articles that they write and get published. Since the compensation that they get isn’t enough for them to survive, at the end of the day journalism is no longer their main source of income and they spend less time researching for the articles that they publish. This is why the quality or the published articles is lower than decades ago.

Today in the Internet Era, a typical News Website sustains its budget mostly from incomes coming from advertising, rather than the quality of the news that they publish.

In this new paradigm, Internet generates every day more money for hardware manufacturers and software developers instead of rewarding those who create contents.

Internet, because of its open and public condition, offers unlimited opportunities to anyone who wants to have its own news website and wants to publish contents.

This leads to a continuous degradation of journalism on the Internet: If you don’t get rewarded for the articles that you publish, you can´t invest to keep the best writers in your staff.

Bloggers are more than happy with this situation, because with the degradation of the contents quality in the News Websites, they are starting to see an increase of the visits that they get in their blogs.

However this is temporary, their visitors will leave very soon if your blog contents don’t get refreshed and improved.

There’s also a strong competition coming from social networks, a place where nobody needs to legitimate what gets posted.

We live in an absolute democracy of the instantaneous contents. Literally a chaos.

The practice of stealing copyrighted material and “copy/pasting” someone else’s stuff is widely accepted and “legitimated”.

All this is killing journalism, because internauts think that they know about everything and what they don’t know can be searched and considered valid information.

It is time for the Internet to find creative ways to compensate journalism for its efforts or the quality and accuracy of information will continue to deteriorate.